I was looking over a local Free ISP, called NoCharge ( http://www.nocharge.com ). This ISP has no ads, banner or otherwise, requires no special software, and doesn’t take any information about you whatsoever. You don’t even get a personal account, just a generic one. They seem to have a lot of dialups.
This begs the question: How on EARTH do they make money? Netzero is loaded with banner and other ads and they still don’t make a profit. It looks like they’re making a bit of money off of the website perhaps, but nothing significant. I also notice that they charge for a premium service. Could they have enough upgraders to make this worthwhile?
Is this some sort of scam?
BTW: I’m posting this from a nocharge account, so I know that there are no hidden banners on a proxy or anything.
Last time I looked, tech service calls were to a 900 number and cost US$10 a pop. Still doesn’t seem like a big source of revenue, though.
I’d say that NCPlus is the direction they’re headed, and I wish them well, even though it’s kind of sad. In the world of “free” ISPs, they always struck me as a class act.
Au contraire, OttoDaFe. If you make a application so buggy and complicated that it confuses most people out there, or make it so that people need to call that number up to resolve an issue or make it work properly, you’ve got yourself a tiddy little profit in no time.
Kindy shaddy, if you ask me. Because I’d heard a while back that the biggest expense for a company in the application business, or what-have-you, is the product tech support 800 numbers-- a whole ton 'o people call those numbers.
Tack on a fee for that service, and a high fee at that, add some known problems within that program, and you’re making money sooner, rather than later.
I wonder. I mean, if the service is free, then there’s no sunk costs for the user. That means he can switch to MSN or AoL ow whatever very easily. If the program is really buggy enough that you need to call more than a couple times a year, I’d expect all their customers would go elsewhere.
I presume they set your homepage to their site as well. They probably hope that you don’t reset your home page and ‘click through’ that page to get anywhere, they’ll pick up advertising revenue from this.
In addition I don’t think they have to make their software particularly buggy to get calls to tech support – there are some fairly stupid people out there.
I’d guess they make enough money to keep up with demand (just) and hope people take the Plus package after a while.
As well as that they may be selling on details of the e-mail addresses of the users to marketing companies, that may just be me being cynical however.
In the UK there were a few companies that did the same thing, FreeServe made a such good job of it the AOL did adverts which attacked them (kind of).
Or did FreeServe attack AOL … one way or the other. I’m rambling now, I’ll go.
I used nocharge for several months a while back. (I didn’t want to pay for dial-up at home; I hardly used it there since we have a T-1 at work.) I don’t know if anything’s changed with them since then, but I can tell you my experience.
Their dialer worked fine, they didn’t set a home page, and I never had to call for support. When I first started using them, I was rather surprised how good the service was.
Soon, however, it got harder to get connected to them (no answers, no connection, etc.) The connections I got varied widely, from a high of 33K to a low of 400bps. (Yes, you read that correctly- 400bps!) As time went on, it just got worse. When I gave up on nocharge was when it started taking 30-40 tries to get a valid connection. Just FTR, this wasn’t a traffic issue- it made no difference what time of the day or night I tried. And believe me I tried- I actually set my alarm to get up at 4am on a Monday just to dial in. No dice.
Perhaps things have changed since then; but then again, you often get what you pay for.
<sigh> Whatever happened to the good old days when a free ISP could exist almost indefinitely while losing money…aren’t there any mafia types who need a good money laundering operation that could just invent fake upgraded accounts to explain their income and support freeloaders in the meantime?
